Contraband Hearts

by Alex Beecroft

  Tomas winced, glad that she still occasionally gave in to the motherly urge to defend him, but embarrassed that he might be thought of as in need of defence.

  He was embarrassed too on Dean’s behalf. The man still seemed a little dazed, his responses a moment or two late, and his colour ashy. He had been, so Tomas’s friends told him, all over the town searching for evidence with which to hang Tomas. He had been vocally in support of Tomas’s usurping cousins, the bastards who had stolen Tomas’s father’s inheritance and good name, and who now swanned around town flaunting the wealth that should have been his. But it was hard to maintain the pure flame of his anger toward the man, when Dean was so shaken, and had been subjected to such an indignity.

  Dean fidgeted in his chair as though his thoughts were biting ants. “I am grateful,” he said, reluctantly. “I am—some things that I took as certainties are shaken up in me. Old Jack said I might be sold to the Quicks, that they have plantations to which Iskander and I both might have been sent. Is that true?”

  Tomas wished for brandy or rum rather than the slop of twice-brewed tea he was currently drinking. They had a box of good gunpowder tea in the thatch over the outhouse, but of course that could not be offered to a riding officer. “It is. Sir Lazarus has slave-worked estates in Barbados and in Boston, and always an eye out for a bargain. If we cannot find Barnabas anywhere else, it would be a good idea to raid the Quicks’ storehouses, to be sure he isn’t being held there.”

  Some of Dean’s warmth flamed back into his face as he jerked his head up to meet Tomas’s gaze. “No. No, I will believe he might buy a slave himself, but not that he might kidnap a free man off the shore and deprive him of his liberty, knowing—”

  “You think he’s such a saint!” Tomas’s ever-present grievance spat itself out of his mouth without his permission or consent. He heard himself sounding bitter, jealous, irrational, and hated that he couldn’t deny he was any of that. But why should Lazarus have Dean’s good opinion, when he didn’t deserve it? Why shouldn’t that approval belong to Tomas instead? Why shouldn’t Dean be his and not the magistrate’s?

  “He treated me with respect!” Dean flamed up in return, half rising from his seat and pushing his face close to Tomas’s. His breath fanned across Tomas’s eyelashes, smelling of honey and spices, and although Tomas knew it was a threat display, he could not help dropping his gaze to Dean’s mouth. Even curled in challenge, it looked soft, tempting to kiss.

  Tomas collected himself with a hiss, and his anger with himself came out in another attack. “How much respect do you think he has for you, really, when he keeps men of your race in chains?”

  Dean flung himself back into his seat as though he too realized he had come close to a gesture that could never be made in public. He wants me, Tomas thought, glee turning his annoyed arousal into a heady, spiky thing it both hurt and gave pleasure to rub up on. They shouldn’t. He mustn’t. But how nice to know that they both desired it.

  “I don’t need you to point out that slavery is their first thought when they see me,” Dean choked out in a mixture of disappointment and anger. “But it will not always be so. I, in my own person, will make it better. They will look at me and they will see that I am a man of intelligence and action, in every part as good as them. They will have to acknowledge that—”

  His chin compressed, and he put his face in his hands. In the uncomfortable pause that followed, Iskander rose from his chair and draped himself over Dean’s shoulders, hugging him from behind.

  Tomas frowned and turned to Zuliy to explain this development, because it was Iskander who had suffered longest. It was Iskander who should be needing comfort, flying off the handle and weeping, surely?

  “The shock is greatest at the start,” Zuliy said, giving him a sad smile. “The first time you realize how very unimportant you are—how vulnerable you are, and how little anyone else cares. Iskander would have been through that when he was first captured, and by now I dare say he has grown some defences. He has become at the least a little numb. Mr. Dean has not, and is newly devastated.”

  She rose and drifted over to the pantry, giving Tomas a conspiratorial smile as she went. “Perhaps a picnic in the fresh air will restore his spirits, and you two can begin this acquaintanceship again, coming to a better friendship this time.”

  “And what should I do with Iskander? I can always use sail hands. Or he can stay here a short time while I put together a trading cartel to fund an expedition to Ethiopia.”

  His mother laughed and put a mixing bowl down on the table. “You forget that he and I were trained for the peace that comes when all the men are gone. Leave us in our own quarters. We’ll have a nice afternoon baking and chatting while he has time to think. He doesn’t need you breathing down his neck for decisions on the spot. Go on.” She put a satchel of linen-wrapped ham and cheese into his hands, and a small jug of milk, then made sweeping motions toward the door. “Out.”

  A moment later found Tomas and the customs man on the edge of the back garden, looking out to sea. Tomas suppressed a worry that his mother knew him too well, and struggled with the ruthless part of himself that told him to make friends with Dean in order to corrupt him—to have some hold on him that could be used to calm his zeal against smuggling. Just now, with his clothes covered in red mud as though he had bled out of every inch of his skin and with the colour barely coming back into his cheeks, Dean was too vulnerable for Tomas either to attack or to seduce.

  “A picnic with me is probably the last thing you want,” he offered. “I will not tell her if you choose to go back to your lodgings instead.”

  Dean took off his wig. It was a sodden and bloodstained object, and he looked better without it, his short-shorn natural hair a thick cap of curls above eyes so dark they reminded Tomas of the night sky. “No,” he sighed, wide shoulders slumping, but the voice giving a gentleness to his surrender, as of a proud man who finally accepts a comfort. “I think we should talk.”

  “If it’s a day out, then we should go to the castle.” Tomas smiled. The walk would do the man good, and the talk of ghosts up there made it an excellent place for privacy. “Follow me.”

  “A lot of people do, it seems.” Dean watched him out of the corner of his eye as they made a leisurely way onto the high land and down to the very end of the peninsula, where the Black Knight’s castle was a jumble of fallen rock walls, the bleached tan of sandstone laced over with bright-blue patches of cornflowers. There the grasshoppers were shirring away with their sawed legs, and the day’s heat rose in spirals from stones where slow-worms drowsed. “A lot of people follow you—speak well of you. I can’t get a word of condemnation out of them.”

  Praise went to Tomas’s head as it always did, swoony as good wine. “I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “I work hard for that reputation. I take my Methodism seriously. ‘What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?’” His mother would have laughed at the idea that he was humble, but . . .

  “And yet you are a smuggler.” Dean’s stride had opened out over the short journey. When he saw the two stories of round tower standing up from the ruins, he hurdled the walls between himself and the entrance with his old easy confidence, and smiled at Tomas as he ducked inside.

  Tomas’s unusual glee returned in a rush of giddiness, as though a bubble of joy were curving all around him, and through it every landmark acquired a new beauty, a gilded touch. He laughed. “You can’t prove that.”

  “I know it was you in that warehouse.”

  “I don’t see how you can.” Tomas grinned back. “I wasn’t there.”

  His voice echoed in the damp passageway between the keep’s outer and inner doors as they passed through the wall, and then they were inside. Ancient timbers overhead made half of a roof—the other half had been blown apart by a cannonball two hundred years ago. But what was left cast the circular room in cool shade, and ferns grew out of the gaps in the walls. A tree n
estled in the guardroom fireplace, covered in the yellow-pink buttons of unripe apples.

  “But consider this—a lot of the people of Porthkennack are living hand to mouth. The miners do well enough when they strike a lode, but they can have months of digging out dirt, and unless they strike ore, they are paid nothing—they must depend on their neighbours’ charity even to eat. To afford new clothes for a whole family? Who can manage it? So their children are in rags, starving.”

  Tomas’s indignation had not worn out with time. On the contrary, his fervour had only increased. It didn’t hurt, either, that Dean was watching him with a captivated look, as though he was seeing and understanding something wondrous for the first time.

  “Meanwhile obscenely rich people in the government are spending a fortune on luxuries like brandy and lace. Why shouldn’t some of those unnecessary cargoes be used to feed the people of this fine country? Why should the fat pigs get everything, and those who work their fingers to the bone still not be able to afford to live? That is injustice, and it would not be an un-Christian thing to attempt to put it right—to feed the starving. All too often around here smugglers make the difference between life and death. Of course the poor people account them righteous! What man of feeling wouldn’t?”

  “And you are very much a man of feeling,” Dean wetted his lips. Without meaning to, Tomas had backed him into the wall, stalking forward to emphasise his points. Now they stood so close their thighs were interleaved. They were closer than they had been at the table when Tomas had almost forgot himself and kissed Dean because he’d looked so sad.

  Dean’s eyes were shining now, and his mouth was soft, half smiling. Waiting.

  Unwisely, perhaps ruinously, Tomas leaned in and kissed him anyway.

  For one soaring moment, Dean responded, his mouth softening and opening beneath Tomas’s with a delighted gasp. For one moment, Tomas allowed himself to feel buoyed up, raised like a cork on an ocean of praise, triumph, defiance—a mixture as heady as black powder dissolved in brandy. Out here in public where anyone might see, no less, playing with the man the Quicks intended for his nemesis.

  He made a mmm of approval, assent, in the hollow of his throat. The next thing he knew, Dean had clamped both hands around his upper arms, physically lifted him from his feet, and thrown him away. To make the humiliation worse, Tomas caught his foot on an apple tree root, and staggered like a fool before he could right himself.

  He glared at Dean, feeling the blood come furiously to his cheeks. “What the fuck was that for?”

  Dean was scrubbing at his mouth with the back of his hand, glaring, like he hadn’t known it was coming, as if he couldn’t have stopped it if he’d tried. “This is a ruse, isn’t it?” he accused. “You have me feeling vulnerable, and then you make an attempt on my virtue? Is this a literal seduction to your cause or is it merely some half-baked plan to compromise me—because if that’s the case, you must know you can’t use it without implicating yourself.”

  Tomas’s humiliation turned into a coat of spikes. He bristled up like a steel hedgehog. “Oh, you know everything don’t you, Mr. My-friend’s-a-lord. I don’t know why I keep giving you the time of day. Should have bloody left you in the mines.”

  “I don’t owe you anything for acting like any decent man should—”

  “I didn’t say you did.” Tomas bared his teeth, now so outraged that his fingers were calling for a knife. It was time to end this for all their sakes. “But I had hoped you would at least consider me a decent man, afterward.”

  He rolled his shoulders, shook down his spine, as though he was snapping the parts of a sextant together, making it ready for use. “Evidently nothing I can do outweighs the lure of the rank and money you can gain by attaching yourself to my cousins. Good day to you, then.”

  Dean took in a deep breath as though he was about to protest this accusation, but Tomas was already walking away, stinging at the thought that he had brought the man to one of his favourite places, and that now its tranquillity would forever remind him of offense and . . . and loss.

  Beneath the fury, disappointment rolled like a layer of oil, black, clinging. For a moment there, he’d glimpsed such dreams. What could he not do, with an energetic, intelligent customs man on his side?

  His long, angry stride brought him quickly down to the bay again. In this shifting mood of sorrow and frustration, he was not fit to go home. His mother would not thank him for bringing such a tornado of ill will into her refuge, not while she was trying to make young Iskander feel safe.

  No one deserved to deal with him when he was like this, so he hauled on the rope attached to the ring at the end of his garden, reeling in his jolly-boat, and hopped into it with a sense of thankfulness at the bounce and sway beneath his feet. He unhitched it from its blown-glass buoy, lifted the stick of a mast from its trees, and shipped it into its socket. The sound of the rope rattling through the pulley as he hoisted the single sail was soothing, and when he had picked his way through the various craft moored around the shore and was out among the glassy roll of blue-green breakers, the huge regular heartbeat of the cold ocean comforted him.

  The sea didn’t care if he lived or died. Didn’t pay attention to his humiliations or his triumphs, and that was a cleansing observation—how much did it really matter after all, if the sea didn’t care?

  Sunset was the colour of a flame—deep-orange sky across which a dozen banners of piled golden cloud seemed to glow more brightly saffron as darkness swept in from the east. The sight of it made him think of heaven, and heaven brought him by degrees around to the thought of forgiveness.

  It’s not as though I wasn’t hoping to corrupt him to my purposes, he acknowledged to himself, a prickle of damp cold sweeping up his back and teasing the hairs on the nape of his neck. He was right to assume I was. A man like him on my side would make everything easier, not least because no one would expect it.

  Tomas had friends and sympathizers among the local riding officers. Friendships he cultivated by sending them a spare barrel of liquor every now and then, or allowing them to rake up an occasional net full of wax-wrapped lace for their wives. But they were a poor lot—lazy, mostly, complacent. Making a living like most people and not inclined to go on crusades or to bestir themselves in the cause of feeding the hungry or giving solace to the widows.

  On the one hand, this was ideal for Tomas’s business, but on the other, a man who sympathized with Tomas’s mission to turn this windfall of useless luxuries into lifesaving resources for the town? A man who was capable of turning his own strength and drive into that harness with Tomas, and helping him pull? Well, a man like that would be a prize, and Tomas did not think there was anything wrong with him because he found Dean’s usefulness as attractive as his person.

  We’re both more ambitious men than our circumstances can contain. His anger simmered down as the amber faded from the sky. We would do better together.

  Behind him, he could feel the oncoming rush of a cold front, and when he turned, it was to see the pellucid sky snuffed out by heavy black cloud around a jet-black epicentre. The wind was picking up. It was miles still to the dark heart of the oncoming storm, but already his cheek was spackled with flying water.

  He had been too preoccupied by his own moods and taken those of the sea for granted. That way lay death. He turned and flew for the shore.

  As he struggled to tack upwind toward the harbour, an arm of the storm slid over the descending sun, and it was as though it had been extinguished. One moment the visibility was on the greyish side of a bright evening, the next it was a starless night, with only a sullen red underglow in the east where the ashes of the quenched sun were still smouldering.

  About a league to starboard Tomas caught a glimpse of something white, pointed like an arrowhead toward the heavens. He narrowed his eyes, trying to make it out, wishing he had brought a spyglass. That was a sail, surely? It must be the very tip of a sail catching the light before the shadow rolled over it.

&
nbsp; Darkness curdled inside Tomas, weighing him down. If that was a ship . . .

  As he watched, the sail, now a dim blur, came into view entirely. Another white blur behind it was a twin of the first. She was hull up, growing larger by the minute, and he saw she was a snow, running, running before the storm as though she had no idea she was windward of a shore that was a thousand grinding teeth.

  Tomas had sailed these waters since he was a toddler, and even he did not want to chance his luck in this weather. Contradictory winds blew water into his face with such force that the droplets smarted. He fought with the sail and tiller, trying to keep her on course though the storm was gusting in all directions. A particularly hard shove from north northwest had him bracing his back against the tiller to keep it over as the jolly-boat heeled until she was almost standing on her side.

  When the blast eased, and she righted herself, the mysterious snow was closer still. Tomas was tacking into the wind, but the snow was flying before it and the distance between them had narrowed so much that even in the dark he could make out the horizontal stripes of the American flag snapping forward over her deck from the flagstaff in the stern.

  She would drive herself onto the Needles if she didn’t alter course. Cursing the need for a third hand, Tomas lashed tiller and sail to the larboard gunwale and scrambled through the small lake that was accumulating in the bilges until he reached the canvas-wrapped bundle lashed in the bows where he kept a candle-lantern and a dry tinderbox.

  The canvas was soaked and unwieldy, and with no one to compensate for the wind, it battered the jolly-boat like a racquet batting a tennis ball. Tomas was now so sodden that water ran off his fingertips as he tried to make a spark catch for long enough to let him light the lantern, though he kept his eye on the dim bulk of the coastline—the familiar shapes just about discernible against the sky—to be sure he wasn’t being blown onto the rocks himself.